Purpose

To consolidate, disseminate, and gather information concerning the 710 expansion into our San Rafael neighborhood and into our surrounding neighborhoods. If you have an item that you would like posted on this blog, please e-mail the item to Peggy Drouet at pdrouet@earthlink.net

Monday, September 30, 2013

America's Fastest-Growing Counties: The 'Burbs Are Back

For nearly a half century, the death of suburbs and exurbs has been
prophesied by pundits, urban real-estate interests and their media
allies, and they ratcheted up the volume after the housing crash of
2007. The urban periphery was destined to become “the next slums,”
Christopher Leinberger wrote in The Atlantic in 2008, while a recent book by Fortune’s Leigh Gallagher, The End of Suburbs, claimed that suburbs and exurbs were on the verge of extinction as people flocked back to dense cities such as New York.

This has become a matter of faith even among many supposed
development professionals. “ There’s a pall being cast on the outer
edges,” John McIlwain, a fellow at the Urban Land Institute, told USA Today. “The foreclosures, the vacancies, the uncompleted roads. It’s uncomfortable out there. The glitz is off.”

Yet an analysis by demographer Wendell Cox of
the counties with populations over 100,000 that have gained the most
new residents since 2010 tells us something very different: Suburbs and
exurbs are making a comeback, something that even the density-obsessed New York Timeshas been forced to admit. Of the 10 fastest-growing large counties all but two — Orleans Parish, home to the recovering city of New Orleans, and the Texas oil town of Midland— are located in the suburban or exurban fringe of major metropolitan areas.

Fastest Growiing US Counties: 2010-2012

Counties over 100,000 Population

Rank

County Equivalent Jurisdiction

Growth

1

Williamson, TX

7.94%

2

Loudoun, VA

7.87%

3

Hays, TX

7.56%

4

Orleans, LA

7.39%

5

Fort Bend, TX

7.16%

6

Midland, TX

7.14%

7

Forsyth, GA

7.07%

8

Montgomery, TN

7.04%

9

Prince William, VA

7.04%

10

Osceola, FL

6.97%

Not surprisingly several of these fast-growth areas are in burgeoning
Texas metro areas. The population of Williamson County, on the
outskirts of Austin, has expanded 7.94% since 2010, the strongest growth
in the nation over that period. Far from turning into a slum, over the
past 25 years the county’s residents have enjoyed the Lone Star state’s
fastest rate of income growth and the sixth-highest in the nation. With a
strong tech scene – Dell is headquartered in the Williamson town of
Round Rock — the county has increased employment by 73% since 2000, the third highest rate in the country.

Another Austin outer suburb, Hays County, ranks third on our list,
with population growth of 7.6% since 2010 and 67% since 2000. Also
impressive has been the growth of another Texas exurb, Fort Bend County,
to the west of Houston.

Since 2010 the county’s population has grown 7.2%, and since 2000 employment has increased 78%,
in part due to the expansion of energy companies outside Houston. Fort
Bend County is now home to 625,000 people, considerably more than the
total population of most major core cities, including Atlanta,
Cleveland, Baltimore and Portland. Like many of the boom counties, Fort
Bend is alsoincreasingly diverse,
with a rapidly growing Asian population that is approaching 20% of the
total. It is now the unlikely home to one of the nation’s largest Hindu
temples.

In second place is Loudoun County, 25 miles from Washington, D.C.,
where the population has expanded 7.87% since 2010 and the number of
jobs has grown 83% over the past decade. Much of this has come from tech
and telecommunications companies, as well as growing numbers of jobs
tied to Dulles Airport as well as the nation’s capital.

They are not on the road to “next slum” status: Loudoun is one of the nation’s wealthiest counties.
Another D.C. exurb on our list in ninth place, Prince William County,
Va., ranks among America’s 10 wealthiest counties in terms of per capita
income.Most of the other fastest-growing counties have
a similar profile, attracting large numbers well-educated residents to
the fringe of urban regions.

What these findings demonstrate is that more people aren’t moving
“back to the city” but further out.

In the last decade in the 51 largest
U.S. metropolitan areas, inner cores, within two miles of downtown,
gained some 206,000 people, while locations 20 miles out gained over
8.5 million. Although the recession slowed exurban growth, since 2011,
notes Jed Kolko at Trulia,
suburbs have continued to grow far faster than inner ring areas as well
as downtown. Americans, he concludes, “still love their suburbs.”

Rather than an inevitable long-range shift, the post-crash slowdown
of suburban growth seems to have been largely a response to economic
factors. The retro-urbanist dream of eliminating, or at least
undermining, suburban alternatives depends very much on maintaining
recessionary conditions that discourage relocation, depress housing
starts, as well as lowering marriage and birthrates.

Where incomes are growing along with rapid job growth , suburban and
exurban growth tends to be strong. The metro regions that contain our
fastest-growing counties — Austin, Houston, Nashville and Northern
Virginia — all epitomize this phenomenon. For example, nearly 80% of all
housing growth in greater Houston takes place in the areas west of Beltway 8 (the
outer beltway). A similar pattern can be seen in the D.C. area, where
the number of units permitted in Loudoun has more than doubled since
2007. In 2012 permit issuances were the highest since 2005, and the vast
majority were for either detached or attached single-family houses.

This doesn’t mean the central areas of thriving Washington or
Houston are in decline; both core areas enjoy modest population
growth not seen in many more hard-pressed cities. But this highly
visible and relentlessly promoted growth has not altered the fundamental
pattern of faster development on the fringes. As the economy
strengthens, these trends will become evident in other areas.

It now seems clear that the preference for single-family houses did
not change in the recession, but was just stunted by it. With
construction starts up again— more than two-thirds single family — this trend is beginning to re-assert itself. Mortgage lending is now at the highest level in five years.

Indeed suburbia — or sprawl to use the perjorative term — is back
even in the anti-suburban stretches of the San Francisco area, where
suburban and exurban developers are once again pushing plans to develop new housing for
the area’s expanding workforce. In long-suffering areas such as the
Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, there has been a steady housing
recovery, leading to talk of new development.

Other signs suggest that the widely predicted dense city nirvana may
need to be put on hold. For example, car sales — automobiles dominate
transportation in most suburbs and exurbs — have been on the upswing,
hitting a record in August. And despite predictions that the size of new homes would shrink, the median home size in the country has continued to rise, reaching a record high in 2012.Even shopping malls, long seen as doomed, are experiencing something of a resurgence.
Demographic forces should accelerate suburban and exurban growth. As the economy has improved, we are starting to see an uptick in the birthrate, and household formation.

Given the tendency of families to move to suburbs, this should spark
further growth there in the future. High-density neighborhoods and the
densest U.S. cities may be good for many things, and certain
individuals, but not so much for families. During the last decade, suburbs and exurbs accounted for four-fifths of all household growth, a pattern that does not seem likely to change.

Indeed, what we are seeing now is not the “end of suburbs” but the
end of a brief period in which peripheral development was quashed by the
severity of the Great Recession. With the return of even modest
economic growth, we can expect that most demographic growth will
continue to favor suburbs and exurbs, as has been the case for the
better part of the last half century.